IN A DECEMBER 18, 2002, talk at the National Press Club, Beers presented a "report card" on her first year "selling" America. She spent part of her talk trying to put distance between her new job and her previous employment. "Just because I come from Madison Avenue," Beers noted, "doesn’t mean I think I’m selling." She added that, with US foreign policy, "there is no assumption that we have a ready buyer out there" — and that her efforts were intended to "create a dialogue, which is a really different starting point than a pitch."

Beers trumpeted a number of initiatives — including a program in which American writers wrote about their experiences ("Writers on America") and a series of TV commercials about Muslim life in America dubbed the "Shared Values" campaign. The "Shared Values" ads feature US Muslims talking about their faith and values in the context of the freedoms offered by American life. In an administration that pushes "faith-based " approaches to social problems, the commercials attempted to build a faith-based bridge to deeply religious cultures. "Faith, family, and learning," noted Beers in her self-assessment. "We are much closer to our Arab friends than we are, for instance, to France.... [H]ere we have a natural bridge to be built between us and these countries, and yet it is not at all perceived that way."

Beers observed that much of the Muslim world’s hostility to the US is the result of willful distortions about American life made by the nation’s enemies. "We have all been made aware of the polls which report our eroding good will with the rest of the world," Beers said. "But it’s considerably more intense and more deliberately manipulated by extremist factions in the Middle East. It serves their purpose, you understand, to paint us as decadent and faithless — a place and a people who are inimical to the tenets of Islam. These distortions happen every day in their press, in their magazines, and from their pulpits."

Beers’s initial efforts have been dogged by bad press coverage, refusals by governments in the region to air the material, and unenthusiastic reception from the "target audience." Not all of this negativity can characterized as the work of America’s enemies, however. Indeed, some of the bad press came about because of misunderstanding and distortions at home.

For instance, the "Writers on America" project ran into some ridicule because the compilation ran afoul of a Cold War–era law that prevented its American distribution on "propaganda" grounds. The initiative ran into deeper trouble when the Los Angeles Times reported that some of the writers involved (including novelist Julia Alvarez), worried that their participation implied endorsement of US foreign policy, canceled plans to promote the compilation abroad.

Yet the literary flap pales in comparison with the controversy ignited by the "Shared Values" campaign. Many target nations — including Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon — cited the advertisements’ origin in the State Department and refused to air them. Reaction in places where the ads did run — including Indonesia — was less than enthusiastic, according to numerous published accounts.

Beers defended the program on CNN in a January 16 interview with Aaron Brown. "I think that when you seek, as we are, almost for the first time, to reach past the government and the elites and talk directly to the people in the country, you are waging a bit of a communication war," Beers argued. "And in some of the governments, there was resistance to the fact that the United States was going straight to the people in their country, in the sense that they called it propaganda and they weren’t comfortable with the idea of airing it."

COMPARED WITH other Bush-administration efforts to shape opinion abroad, Beers’s don’t seem so sinister. The wildly controversial (and soon-abandoned) Pentagon proposal to create an Office of Strategic Influence to spread disinformation overseas revealed a White House determined to control its image and stifle its opponents. As did White House communications director Karen Hughes’s post–September 11 effort to pull together a "war room" (called the Office of Global Communications) to provide instant rebuttal to international criticism of US foreign policy.

Yet the underpinnings of Beers’s efforts to brand America differ substantively from the more conventional tack taken by, say, Voice of America, which dumped its traditional Arabic programming in favor of a pop-music format laced with news dubbed "Radio Sawa" (or "Radio Together"). Author and activist Naomi Klein struck at the heart of the problem with branding America worldwide in a March 2002 op-ed for the Guardian that extended the anti-corporate thrust of her best-selling critique No Logo to the political sphere. "When companies try to implement global image consistency," Klein argued, "they look like generic franchises. But when governments do the same, they can look distinctly authoritarian. It’s no coincidence that the political leaders most preoccupied with branding themselves and their parties were also allergic to democracy and diversity. Historically, this has been the ugly flipside of politicians striving for consistency of brand: centralised information, state-controlled media, re-education camps, purging of dissidents and much worse."

Noted American foreign correspondent Dusko Doder took the criticism a step further in a January op-ed for the Baltimore Sun: "Ms. Beers is only a symptom of the real problem. The Bush administration from the very beginning made it plain that it did not care if its rhetoric and policies estranged the rest of the world. This unilateralist attitude changed slightly after 9/11, but the administration still is not focusing on winning influence around the world as a meaningful key to the war on terrorism."

That’s as succinct a rendering of the current administration’s policy/public-diplomacy conundrum as you’ll find — and it has been echoed in almost every article touching on Beers and her tenure at the State Department.

POLICY SHIFTS that will make America an easier sell abroad don’t seem to be in the cards. Congressional support for the White House’s strong pro-Israel tilt (which causes much of America’s unpopularity on the proverbial "Arab Street") is very strong. Confusion and dissension in the ranks of the Democratic opposition have muted any coherent rebuttal to a policy of regime change in Iraq. And far from speaking softly as it carries its big stick toward the Gulf, public pronouncements from White House officials against long-time allies such as France and Germany that profess disagreement with US policy have become acidic and shrill in recent days. (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s lumping of Germany with Libya and Cuba is one particularly notable example.)

So how can America improve its "brand" when its policies rub so many in a global audience the wrong way? It’s a crucial question as war looms and the global hunt for terrorists drags on into its second year, but few solutions are in the offing.

In autumn 2002, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) created an independent task force on US public diplomacy. The task force sought to solve the policy/public-diplomacy conundrum by calling for a "new paradigm" that includes "fully integrating public diplomacy needs into the very foundation of American foreign policies in the first place." (USIP’s Kauzlarich — who served as the US ambassador to sensitive posts such as Azerbaijan and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Clinton administration — chuckles a bit over the notion of handing public diplomats a prominent seat at the policy table. "Those folks always feel left behind," says Kauzlarich, "but that never changes.")

One of the more intriguing parts of the CFR’s report was a call to "deliver more bang for the government buck by creating a much expanded role for the private sector" — including the creation of a "Corporation for Public Diplomacy" (along the lines of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to foster private/public funding and content synergy — and to shield public-diplomacy efforts from the taint of "propaganda." And, in this time of ballooning deficits, the CFR task force also called for tripling or quadrupling public-diplomacy funding — from $1 billion to $3 or $4 billion. The FY 2004 budget just submitted to Congress by the White House calls for only $1.2 billion in funds for programs traditionally associated with public diplomacy.

Yet for all that, as Kauzlarich observes, US public diplomacy hasn’t been very effective in telling America’s story. "Over the long haul," says Kauzlarich, "its effectiveness has been marginal at best." He argues that "all the learned reports that get put out often miss the point; it is important to have moderate and local voices in Muslim countries that can raise issues in a credible way."

Which brings us back full circle to Brookings Institution visiting scholar and Pakistani news editor Ejaz Haider. In his Washington Post op-ed, Haider wrote, "Mere rhetoric about Islam’s being a great religion or the fact that the war on terrorism is not a war against Islam or even that registration is not about racial profiling will not do."

In other words, America has got to walk it like it talks it — and even the biggest bullhorn touting brand America can be drowned out by its actions.

Richard Byrne can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net